Conducting young musicians handpicked for the concert, Adams inaugurated Carnegie Hall's newest performance space with music by some of his favorite composers: Charles Ives, Lou Harrison, Thomas Adès and Esa-Pekka Salonen. That evening's concert was the first of eight that Adams curated, using his broad musical taste as his guide. Adams said, "I regularly go to concerts, and more than 50% of the time I can be found in a club or alternative performance space rather than at an opera or a symphony."

A native of New England, John Adams studied at Harvard before moving to his current home of San Francisco in the 1970s, where he quickly became involved in that city's seemingly boundary-free new music scene. Programming Zankel Hall's opening weekend was reminiscent of that exciting period, when he produced concerts and created the "New and Unusual Music" series for the San Francisco Symphony, programming little-known contemporary music while simultaneously serving as the orchestra's first composer-in-residence. A number of Adams's best-known orchestral works were written during that period, including Harmonium, Grand Pianola Music, and Harmonielehre.

In 1985, Adams began a collaboration with the stage director Peter Sellars and poet Alice Goodman that produced two acclaimed operas, the Grammy Award-winning Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. Adams again collaborated with Sellars in 2000 for the evening-length oratorio El Niño.

The 56-year-old composer's renown has continued to grow in recent years. In 1999, Nonesuch Records, Adams's exclusive label since 1985, released The John Adams Earbox—a 10-CD box set retrospective representing nearly all of the composer's recorded output. In 2003, Adams was awarded his first Pulitzer Prize for his On the Transmigration of Souls, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to mark the first anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. That same spring, citywide festivals celebrating his music were presented in New York and London.

NEXT: Randy Newman